Schuyler's Mill

"When I was working the midnight shift, many times Henry Ford would visit unannounced," recalls
Kenny Rogers, who was employed at the Ford Soybean Mill in Saline in the 1940s, when he was a
teenager. During Ford's last years, the auto tycoon bought up old mills all over southeast Michigan
and used them to pursue his sometimes eccentric personal interests. At the Saline mill, workers
extracted oil from soybeans, oil that Ford used to make enamel paint and plastic for automotive
steering wheels, switches, and knobs.

When Ford bought the Saline mill in 1935, it was already ninety years old. Schuyler Haywood had
built the gristmill in 1845, and it soon became the center of an independent town as Haywood's
relatives and other businesses settled nearby. Haywood named the town Barnegat, after his hometown
in New Jersey. "Barnegat was a booming town and Saline a bedroom community," explains Saline
historian Alberta Rogers. "They had barrel making, a slaughterhouse, even a house of ill repute."
Barnegat was annexed to the village of Saline in 1848.

Barnegat and downtown Saline, about a half mile apart, were separated by a big hill, as high as
the hill where the American Legion sits now. Ford flattened the hill when he bought Schuyler's Mill.
He also moved the mill building farther from the road and built a factory behind it, in a Greek
Revival style compatible with the mill.

A farm boy who became the world's most famous industrialist. Ford was intrigued by the notion of
making car parts from crops. He provided soybean seeds to many area farmers, who delivered their
harvests to the old mill building. A chute dropped the beans from their third-floor storage bin to a
conveyor belt, which carried them to the new factory. There, oil was extracted from the beans with
steam and a solvent. The oil was stored in a tank in the adjoining pump house until it could be
trucked to Ford's River Rouge plant, where it was used to make plastics and paints. The leftover
soybean meal was dried, toasted, and sold as animal feed. A water-powered generator in the mill
produced most of the operation's electricity. Soy-based paints were tested in a lab on the second
floor.

The plant operated around the clock except on Sunday. Only five or six people worked on each
shift, since it was mostly automated. Rogers remembers they spent a lot of time cleaning in
anticipation of Ford's surprise visits.

"We kept it immaculate; we'd polish the brass valves, wax the floors," Rogers recalls. Ford
usually came accompanied by friends. "They'd be all dressed up in suits and ties as if they'd been
out to dinner, and Ford said, 'I'll take you out and show you.' The mills were his toys."

After Ford's death, the mill was sold to a soybean processing company, but the machinery soon
became obsolete. Barbara Hamel, daughter of the new owner, re-named Ford's factory the "carriage
house" and started a summer theater there (the actors slept in the mill building next door). WAAM
radio host Ted Heusel remembers directing plays there. One of Heusel's apprentices at the playhouse
was Martha Henry; now one of Canada's most prominent actresses, she recently starred in Much Ado
about Nothing at the Stratford Festival.

In 1964, Carl and Micki Weller purchased the buildings and grounds, and they have steadily worked
at restoring and landscaping them ever since. Once an antique shop, then a cafe, the buildings now
house a banquet facility, run by Carl and Micki's daughter, Wendy Weller. There's room for three
events at the same time—in the carriage house and on two floors of the mill. The old pump house is
now Weller's office.

Traces of the old operation add flavor to events at Weller's. Pathways are paved with old
firebricks, and the old steam boiler is now used as a bar. The carriage house although not
air-conditioned, is surprisingly cool in the heat of summer, thanks to windows and vents designed to
draw out air from the factory. Carl Weller, who has come to understand the soybean extraction
operation well after years of renovation work, explains, "The steam made it so hot [that] even in
winter, they could work in their undershirts."

Find out the history of the city around you with this collection of over 130 local history articles published in the Ann Arbor Observer. The articles (many written by renowned local historian and author Grace Shackman) describe everything in Ann Arbor, from its churches to its shops to its gardens. Articles are illustrated by a large collection of photographs from Ann Arbor's early days to its present days.